Collapse, Secesion and Decline…Oh My!!!

I’ve lost a lot of interest in financial markets over the past few years. As I’ve written before, I think there’s four reasons for this…

1. the impeding doom & gloom just around the corner constantly forecast around 2010-12 never seemed to happen and “business as usual” has lulled many people to sleep. Myself included.

2. These days I have less money to think “where should I put it?” about.

3. General lifestyle changes that geared me away from taking in too much material like reason #1.

4. Nothing really remarkable happening in the silver/gold market in the past few years.

….but lately I’ve been thinking more about it. In order to help me remember what I already know, I started doing some videos on YouTube on the basics of silver, assuming a complete novice is watching. I’m up to eight videos, I think and I assume this will wind up in the neighborhood of 25 or so short videos covering topics like spot price, how to order it, what’s junk silver, what should I buy, gold vs. silver, barter prospects, industrial market for silver, etc.

The “migrant crisis” has probably been the most polarizing thing to happen within Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not only is it polarizing within the individual nations, it’s also polarizing nation-to-nation within the European Union.

The EU as an entity believes that the Union, and thus the individual member states have a moral imperative to take in large numbers of migrants and apparently do something resembling assimilating them into European society. The national policies of a substantial portion of the EU go along with the guidelines from Brussels and some even seem to go a step further. There are, however, a few countries that have said “no thank you”.

Apparently now the EU is looking to legally punish these countries (mentioned in the title) for not “pulling their weight” by taking in refugees.

Here’s what gets me…. If it is deemed a good thing, a beneficial thing to take in all of these people, why aren’t the other member states of the EU saying “Fine, sucker, more for me!”. Let’s say the EU was just giving out money or something else valuable and a handful of countries said no thanks, would the other countries fall all over each other to say “I’ll take their share!”? Probably.

If that’s not the case where it’s a beneficial thing and it’s something more along the lines of a thankless moral responsibility to take in so many migrants from the Middle East, why won’t they have the discussion from that angle? No, instead dissent against immigration is largely suppressed. Can you imagine how it would be if the national discussion was “yeah, we don’t get anything out of this but we feel a sense of responsibility so we’re going to do it…”? It would be a complete game-changer, politically. The discussion would very quickly veer into the realm of “who says we have to do this?” and ultimately challenge the authority of the European Union.

Here’s the other angle to this that gets me…. The European Union is basically saying that the hopes and desires of people who aren’t even European supersede those of their fellow Europeans. That’s grounds for a lot of resentment right there.

Also on that same note, if they want to make this experiment work, are they really willing to ostracize a notable chunk of the EU over non-Europeans? By this I mean the handful of nations who aren’t interested in migrant resettlement and I also mean the large swaths of citizens of ALL European nations who range from “uncomfortable” with immigration rates to completely opposed to it. Doesn’t seem worth it to me if they want to give the EU any sort of meaningful viability going forward.

The God Emperor pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord the other day, which caused quite the stir amongst the left. Reactions ranged from “how regrettable” to assertions of impeding doom and it seems like the latter was more common than the former.

Trump’s base seemed pretty happy with the decision and admittedly he scored a pretty good soundbite with his “I was elected to represent Pittsburgh, not Paris” line.

I’m absolutely in favor of pulling out of this treaty, with an asterix. I view it as little more than an outlet for developed nations to throw some cash at a problem, deflect culpability and even pat themselves (ourselves) on the back for being able to say we bought some solar panels for Burkina Faso or whatever. However I’d like to see us follow our own path, one of meaningful solutions that are simple but maybe not easy.

Normally I groan when I hear objections to environmentalism in the way of “it’s going to hurt jobs”. If something needs to be done, it needs to be done. If there’s a guy getting paid to dump toxic sludge in a river or something, I’d prioritize the health of that waterway over his paycheck any day. In this case I think there really is an economic argument that the price tag isn’t worth the results that this program promises…and who knows if it’ll actually deliver the modest results they project.

To me it seems like a make-work program for bureaucrats that they’ll know countries will fund because “it’s for the climate” – how could anyone close their wallet to that? It’s almost like the “think of the children!” slam dunk. If you don’t fund the program, they can come up with all kinds of doomsday scenarios that will surely ensue…and all they need is a modest couple of trillion dollars to prevent it.

I absolutely believe that this program and others like it are geared towards taking advantage of others’ good intentions for meaningless results. Fortunately our guy balked at it.
My biggest objection to this brand of environmentalism is the laziness it encourages. It completely removes individual responsibility from the discussion and whittles societal responsibility down to a matter of signing a check while counting on “science” to come up with something to allow everyone to continue to live the same lifestyle, only more “green”.

Sadly, Trump’s rejection is only going to encourage more of that laziness. Now any and all environmental crises that should arise are going to be pinned on one man. The ability to say “thanks, Drumpf!” is going to put a shadow over any uncomfortable inward reflection as a private individual or at a societal level on how you/we got to wherever it is you/we end up. I really believe that a large segment of the population believes that voting the right way or even simply “caring” is good enough. I don’t see a huge difference between how one side of the debate lives over the other…just how they “feel”.

Admittedly it is very hard to live a true sustainable lifestyle in the developed world. This is a problem. The infrastructure just isn’t there to do so and I’ll be the first to admit that at this point I almost take a “ride the tiger” approach and accept that some day it’ll all come to a heed whether we like it or not.

On that note, the asterix I spoke of is that I would like to see the Trump admin do *something* meaningful in the way of the environment. He would be the right guy for high speed rail that many Americans dream of or revamping many towns and small cities in the Rust Belt/Great Lakes/New England area that are very well suited to real human-scale living with walkable streets, buildings that were built to last, etc. There are many places in the US that pretty much just need a fresh coat of paint and could be billed as the green villages of the future – because they were built in an era where fossil fuels weren’t readily available.

I suppose subsidizing our “green energy” sector would be good too, as long as we had realistic expectations of what it can do for us, what it can’t and what the cost of it is. Part of the deal with the Paris accord is to provide clean energy for the developing world. If it’s all the same in terms of thinking globally on carbon output, what’s the difference if we just do it here for ourselves?

At the end of the day, Trump did remove us from the Paris Accord. What he didn’t do though was remove you from the Backyard Accord. Or the Household Accord. Or the Neighborhood Accord, nor the Community Accord. There’s way too much that can be done at the individual, family or community level to improve the environment to believe that a (flawed) deal like the Paris Accord should make or break anything.

I should post more. That’s always the death knell of a blog. When you start out it’s hard to stay away from the keyboard and then over time it gets harder to sit down in front of the keyboard.

When I started this several years ago, I was in a different place than I was now. I didn’t have much of a social life (well, still don’t) and honestly very little in the way of responsibility outside of going to work and maintaining the house. I worked the night shift and my wife would typically go to bed around 10pm, so on my nights off I’d typically have around four hours to myself, usually spent in front of a computer.

I also consumed A TON of information. I’d spend my 12 hour shifts at work listening to podcasts. A lot of it was redundant – a lot of stuff about economic and societal collapse. It seemed only natural that with taking in so much and not having a lot of people to talk things over with that at some point I’d come up with another outlet to kick back my ideas to the world…and that’s basically what happened.

After a few life changes, this kind of thing took a back burner in life, although I always kept a *desire* to pursue writing and told myself that I should rededicate myself to it…at some point in the future.

My lifestyle has changed a bit that makes it more difficult to put the time in. Before my work schedule left a lot of “dead time” late at night and in the afternoon where I could work on things. These days it seems like I get a little bit of time at night when I get off work – that is if I don’t walk the dogs, do the dishes or get distracted with any other…distraction.

I also decided to take a break from a lot of the kinds of material I was constantly exposing myself to. That’s had an effect on my lack of contributions here, as I feel I’ve kind of typecast this blog as being about a couple of subjects. Do I make this blog about a couple subjects or do I make it more personal? Or some hybrid of both? Or does it even matter?

The good news is I’ve been keeping busy with a couple other creative projects that fill that void. For one, our tea business. We’ve done a few videos about herbs and such, but we’re going to ramp that up with a podcast in the immediate future. In fact, I’ll probably record tonight. I’ve also been doing a podcast about the history of the Cold War (www.coldwarcast.com) and I’m about 30 episodes into it, so I guess that’s actually “a thing” at this point. So I suppose I could say that writing here has taken a backseat to these other things.

I’ve done a few youtube videos about some “hot topics” over the past year and a half, which has been an interesting experience. I did two videos about the book Camp of the Saints. One was over a year ago and then I did another one recently when it came into the news that Steve Bannon mentioned it. The first one was a review and discussing how eerily similar it was to the ongoing migrant crisis in Europe, the second one was basically saying that it’s funny that the news story was that the book was racist (and that Bannon read it/recommended it) without discussing the connections between the book and reality. I made a statement, playing on the “1984 is supposed to be fiction, not an instruction manual” quip that gets tossed around online discourse often that Camp of the Saints was supposed to be fiction, not an instruction manual….

Anyways, it was kind of an interesting experience because somehow the video with little ol’ me made the rounds on some leftist sites/facebook groups and I got “raided”. A slew of dislikes and a ton of comments about my voice, the gap between my front teeth, receding hairline, etc. Also a lot of attempted “gotcha” comments like “do you admit this book is racist???”, as if it even matters. There were a lot of people from India that got in on the attack too, as the book is pretty harsh on Indians – admittedly too harsh, but it does play into the storyline. The constant notifications got a little annoying and at this point both videos have divulged into a cesspool in the comment section.
I like the idea of having this blog as a more general thing. Being able to write out thoughts/ideas feels good. I’m just not sure exactly where it fits into my big picture but I know it fits in somewhere.

For the past several years it seems like I’ve spent New Years’ Eve deleting the past years emails from my inbox. Yeah, exciting. I guess that’s what happens when you have young kids. I’ll unsubscribe to a few emails and maybe stay on top of it for a day or two and then ultimately they build back up again…then repeat process new year.

Not this year though. So far I’ve been doing really good about keeping my inbox at a manageable level. It feels kind of nice to not look at my yahoo account and see a number up into the thousands.

I unsubscribed to a few email lists to help myself out, but I found that sometimes that’s not good enough or sometimes lists have multiple layers of lists and you have to unsubscribe to it in two (or more) different places.

I’ll keep an email that needs to be addressed around long enough for it to be addressed and then delete it. I suppose in a way that helps me keep on top of things instead of knowing it’ll be on the next page within the next 36 hours or whatever.

By keeping the emails down, it’s also caused me to actually consider some of the emails from lists I get. Instead of feeling like I don’t have the time to look at these kinds of things, now some of them at least get a click and scan before getting deleted. I even have a podcast I “subscribe” to where part of the benefit is a weekly analysis of the financial markets that were just getting skipped over due to an overload of emails – now I actually take the time to look at it.

I understand how clutter happens “IRL”, but it can also happen in the digital world and it’s good to declutter from there (here?) from time to time again.

Maybe next NYE I’ll tackle my email account for this webpage – which at this point only gets looked at once in a blue moon.

A couple weeks ago we went and picked up ten chickens plus a coop from a lady here in town that couldn’t take care of them anymore. Actually, they were very well cared for, but she and her husband were having to do a lot of traveling due to an aging mother in Alabama. It’s usually pretty easy to find someone to take care of a dog – pretty much everyone has the experience necessary to let a dog out and fill up some dishes a few times a day. Even though chickens aren’t too hard to take care of, it’s definitely more of a tall order to get someone to come over and check on them while you’re gone.

We got a really, really good deal. $150 for the coop and chickens, which are less than a year old. Originally we asked about just the chickens and they wanted $50 for all ten. To be honest, we could’ve bought the chickens and then later that afternoon probably sold them all for at least $150. And probably $150 or $200 for the coop, because it actually is pretty well built….but we wanted the chickens.

They’re all a red hybrids, which tend to be very good layers and docile. We planned on getting some more interesting breeds this spring, but I was happy to get in on this deal. It also saves us the hassle of raising chicks this spring, which is kind of a pain in the ass.

Sometimes introducing two flocks can be tense, but honestly it was about as seamless as you could ask for. There were a few little dust-ups, but at this point both flocks coexist fairly well. There’s one “new” chicken that joined the old flock right away, so I have one group of 9 and then one group of 11 – although this group of 11 can divide into 5, 5 and 1 between my oldest chickens, the ones from last year that often hang together and then this oddball that joined up.

My older chickens have really slowed down egg laying over the winter, but these new ones are almost at an egg per chicken a day….so I’m getting anywhere from 10-14 or so eggs a day.

This is nice because for a while we’ve pretty much only had enough for our own consumption and had to buy regular eggs from the store for the dogs (they get one a day). Now we can feed the dogs and give some to the neighbors. I think this is an important thing to do because it keeps the neighbors happier about the fact my backyard is full of chickens and in a way makes them kind of involved in the process. The guy behind me often throws his spilled birdseed over the fence for them, they always come running whenever he opens his back door and comes out.

In addition to all the eggs we can get and a few for the neighbors, we’ll probably have enough to sell a dozen or two a week. While not a huge source of income or anything, it’ll help offset some of the cost to feed them, which isn’t too much in the grand scheme of things. A bag of food that will last the chickens about a week costs around $10 so selling the excess will cover about half of that. Then once spring breaks, they’ll be foraging bugs and plants most of the day and eating less commercial feed.

When I first wanted chickens, I wanted about four or five. That turned to ten. That turned to fifteen (then back to ten, thanks to predators) and now I’m up to twenty. Funny how those things work.

Today I spent virtually my whole day in an elementary school gymnasium at a craft sale that was a fundraiser for the PTA or some shit like that. The sale went from 10-3pm, I got there around 845 to setup and left around 3:30. The event cost $50 for a table.

How much did I make? $46. I couldn’t get that final sale to push me over the bar to at least recoup the table fees. So basically after accounting the $46, I’m out $4 and then probably about $25-30 in product and most important, about seven hours of my time.

Although there was about as much traffic as you’d expect at something like this (on the low side), no one was really interested in our tea. This was easily the worst show we’ve done so far. I think the next closest might have been close to $100 and an honorable mention to one where we paid $100 to do $200 in sales. I think the people next to us selling string art sold nothing. I don’t think my story today was really unique, as it looked like most vendors spent most of the time on their phones.

I don’t know what to make of it. On one hand, it’s easy to look at these kinds of events and say my time is better spent doing absolutely nothing at home due to the real chance of not making enough money to justify the time/resources spent. On the other, just like the lottery you can’t win if you don’t play. You never know who will come across you, maybe someone might buy a few bags of tea and then become a regular customer who buys a few more over the course of the year and tells one of their friends to buy a few. You never know.

At any rate, I guess it’s not money that I was really banking on, like if we don’t make anything at this show we starve the rest of the week or anything like that. Losing from time to time is a part of doing business and if you take the rewards, you have to take the risks too. I guess today was just one of those days…

We’re doing another show at a better location with the same people next month. Hopefully that goes a little bit better.

I really don’t get it. The same people who are convinced we’re only a couple armbands away from the Third Reich where basically everyone who isn’t an able-bodied conservative white Christian male is about to be thrown in the camps are the same people crying about “refugees” and other immigrants not being allowed to come in. A lot of people are convinced “we’re all going to die in a thermonuclear war” as well.

At what point is it these people’s duty as a moral human being to STOP these people from wanting to come in? I mean, if things are heading anywhere near half as bad as these people make it out to be, shouldn’t they be working around the clock to convince these people to go somewhere else? It just seems kind of sadistic to subjugate people from the Islamic world “looking for a better life” to the allegedly high possibility of extreme discrimination in a country where approximately half the people must be racist sociopaths due to their voting decisions.

Friday marks Barry O’s last day of his two four year terms as president and earlier in the evening I took a few minutes to think over the past eight years with him in office. So I figure I’ll share a few fragmented, disjointed pieces of my train of thought on Obama…

When he won in 2008 against a “moderate” “Republican” “war hero” with as much credibility as John McCain, I’ll admit I was a little blown away on how that could happen. I didn’t vote for McCain (or Obama), but I didn’t get how a guy like Obama could beat a guy like McCain at that point in our history. It makes a little more sense to me now and I should’ve found the answer in the fact that I wouldn’t vote for McCain. When he won against Mitt Romney, the most unelectable electable guy in America, I was considerably less surprised.

I guess I was surprised he beat Hillary too, although in retrospect the demographics of the Democratic party was shifting in a way that made that possible. Looking back, I get why they chose Obama over Hillary, even though she didn’t quite have the same evil aura over her as she does these days.

I always had a hard time viewing Obama as being black and the idea of the “first black president”. While certainly true, he wasn’t of the black community as we know it in the US. His dad was from Kenya and his mother was from Kansas. He was raised by his white mother & family and probably had little interaction with African-Americans in his formative years. His ancestors weren’t slaves (at least not in the South) and he never had the common experiences of the African-American community.

I remember a conversation I had with a black guy at work about Obama’s race. I told him that I think Obama would be much more at home doing brunch in Portland with white people than he would at a barbecue in Detroit. Now that I think about it, Obama probably had more in common with me, a middle class white guy, than this black guy I was talking to who had a background in inner city Detroit and Cleveland.

Obama seems likable on a personal level, but with strong undertones of condescension and self-aggrandizement.

The guy never really impressed me, either. I once saw someone describe him as someone who’s true calling in life was to be a professor at a community college and that sounds about right. Certainly not a complete fuck-up, but not the first choice for someone to run the country. He just wasn’t a very awe-inspiring guy.

I don’t think he really had any areas where he was particularly bright, like foreign policy, military, economics, etc. No real strong points. Just kinda all around mediocre.

I don’t think he was ready for the job. There’s something to be said for executive experience in some capacity and he just didn’t have it or any real inclination towards it. I don’t think Hillary had a lot of executive experience either, but no one doubted her ability to take the reigns.

Everyone thought that GW Bush was an idiot – except for the people that actually matter in the world. He held his own with world leaders and the movers and shakers of the world. Obama had the opposite – the people who didn’t matter thought he was the messiah and the people that did matter thought he was an idiot. Fortunately for him/us, Obama was likable and I think he received a lot of goodwill from the world in his early years.

He did get to be a better speaker as the years went on.

Did Obama heal America’s “racial divide”? No. Things aren’t much different than they were in 2008 as far as that goes. Overall I don’t think he made things that much worse, but there were definitely points in his presidency where he fanned flames he shouldn’t have or made comments that could be seen as an affront to white America. I’m thinking about that asshole black professor with the trike and the cop, weighing in on Trayvon (although admittedly it is hilarious every time I see “If Barack Obama had a son, he’d look like <black criminal of the day>” in the comments section) and courting Black Lives Matter.

Does he have the same reverence for western culture, traditional America, etc, as we would expect from our president? I don’t think so. I think that he did hold the belief that America should be deconstructed/reconstructed into something more closely resembling a neoliberal wonderland.

Is he a Muslim? No. Is he a Christian? I doubt that, I think that’s something he just uses for political expediency and then downplays it for political expediency as well. We could’ve had our first openly atheist president.

A lot of bad things happened on his watch – with his thumb prints on it. I’m thinking the rise of the surveillance state and the continuation and expansion of the wars, even though he was elected to not do this.

Even though these things would be “evil”, I doubt Barry is an evil guy. I always got the impression that he was an order taker and that’s about it. Sure, all presidents probably were order takers to some extent but at least you can see the other presidents being “in” on it and scheming alongside everyone, not just being told what to do. I doubt he was really 100% on board with everything he went along with. That’s not an excuse for him because yes, the buck does stop with him.

If he were a little less narcissistic, maybe he would have an interesting story to tell about the “deep state”. Admitting he wasn’t in charge would be a blemish on his legacy.

I thought the love affair with him and liberals ended a few years ago when he was “just like Bush” but I’m seeing a lot of nostalgia for him lately from people who have a little more anti-establishment bent. Kind of funny. I think it’s just because Trump is coming in.

It always irked me that when he talked to black crowds he would change his speech to sound more like a black preacher and then when he would talk to white people he would sound like Kermit the Frog. But that’s none of my business (ha).

He did become a better speaker as the years went on and became a little quicker on his feet I thought.

Holy shit, did the job age him!

I don’t really know anything about his daughters and honestly that’s probably a good thing that they were largely kept out of the limelight.

A lot of people think Michelle Obama will run in 2020 and it almost seems like there’s been a PR campaign to improve her image lately. No fucking way that’s happening.

I’ve made attempts before at keeping track of what I eat and although it seems like a simple task, it always goes by the wayside a few meals later. I’ve been fairly successful ballpark guessing my daily protein intake, but never *everything* I eat. I’m about a week into doing it on an app that does all the adding and computing for you and I think I’ve learned a few things.

First, my ballpark figures on how much protein I tend to consume in a day is pretty accurate, usually a shade north of 200 grams a day (at about 180lbs). This is good and I’ll try to keep it around there, if not even a little higher.

Like most people, my eating habits are pretty predictable and on the days I work very highly structured. I pack the same snacks every day and my main meal of the day is usually pretty consistent, most often chicken with sweet potato and vegetables. When I stick to the “regular” foods, my diet looks pretty good.

I think I fall into a trap that a lot of other people do – the “I usually eat healthy/exercise so it’s ok to slip up every now and then…” trap. And it’s easy to tell yourself that about as many times as you want. I do believe it is true if you *usually* keep clean, it’s ok to splurge here and there, but it got a little too frequent for me.

I’m not trying to say that I’m morbidly obese or anything – I’ve probably put on 10-20lbs that I could do without over the past year or so. Not a huge deal. I’ve just decided I’d like to get back down to the high 160’s while keeping as much of my muscle mass as possible. For what it’s worth, I did put on a noticeable increase of muscle with the weight gain, which was the goal.

Keeping track of what comes in so far has been pretty valuable…and it confirms that the “extras” can be a killer. I know there were plenty of days in the past few months where maybe I added a breakfast sausage or bacon to my normal breakfast, then maybe Mary baked banana bread or something that I had before work, then maybe when I got home from work I grabbed a handful of m&m’s from that fucking candy jar that always gets me and maybe had a beer. So if I get just about all of my calories from the things I should be eating, I just added another 700-1000 to it. There’s 3500 calories per pound of fat, so it doesn’t take too long to see how that adds up

I also confirmed that on the weekends when my eating isn’t as structured as it is during the weekdays, I’m high on sugar and fat and low on protein. I made a point yesterday to try to eat more like I would on a Tuesday and kept the sugar low – I think I had two peanut butter cookies over the course of the day and several servings of fruit.

I’ve also been slacking off on vegetables lately, which usually I’m pretty good about eating a wide range of vegetables. I started bringing some various raw veggies with me to work, whereas I was just bringing carrots to fill this void before. I will probably try going forward to prepare a bag of mixed raw veggies on Sunday for the upcoming week.

According to the app, it says I usually fall a little short on a couple vitamins and minerals. This kind of surprises me considering the things I eat, but I may need a multivitamin. I’d rather not, so if I can get everything from food I’d prefer that way. Not that there’s anything wrong with multivitamins.

I get plenty of fiber in my diet. I start the day off with oatmeal and I usually get enough fruits and veggies. My protein powder has fiber in it as well, as does my protein bars. So we’re good there.

After tallying up the normal foods I should eat, there is a little bit of wiggle room where I can reasonably have something like a cookie, slice of banana bread, a few squares of chocolate, etc. I’d like to make those things a little more sporadic though.

One thing I’m still a little shaky on is what would be my daily caloric expenditure? I imagine I burn a lot at my job, or at least more than someone who works in a cubicle and I usually spend about an hour at the gym lifting and such. I’ll usually get a couple walks in a week with the dogs. Then there’s hockey – I know I burn a SHITLOAD in one game, just based on how hungry I always feel afterwards. It would be wise to plan “cheat meals” around Sunday and hockey for this reason.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep up with this. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but even just doing it for a week has caused some changes in my diet and more importantly, let me know where I was at and where I could improve. Now instead of saying “well, I usually eat healthy…” and having that always be a free pass, I know how things actually stack up. Worthwhile endeavor.